You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

The new pornographers are kind of a supergroup with seven members in the band, including Niko Case and Dan Behar,

who are both acclaimed songwriters with their own successful solo careers.

But the band's lead by Carl Newman, and in this episode, he breaks down the title song from their sixth album,

Braille Bruzzers. Plus, you'll hear some thoughts from bassist and co-producer John Collins.

My interview with Carl Newman is recorded live at the Green Space at WN Weissum.

Carl Newman.

There was a guitar part. I had an idea for it. It sounds really clumsy, but I remember thinking like,

oh, this is a cool guitar part.

The chords are sort of a bone-headed. It's just an A and then like an A with the G added, and it goes to D.

It's like just couldn't be simpler. It's the hardest thing to do. It's just come up with something completely just dead simple.

When I first started writing songs, I wanted to write something really complex, because I thought

that was the only way to write something that was interesting was like trying to come up with

chord progressions or structures that nobody else had ever done before. I tried to do that for years,

and then in this band, I just tried to do what I thought was dumbing it down.

I'm trying to get dumber, actually. I'm really trying to explore like how dumb can I get musically,

lyrically? I'm trying to make a goal of this, and I figure, getting really dumb has always worked for me.

Because I've always thought we were dumb from the beginning. I was shocked when people started talking

about us as a band that had any sort of complexity. I remember playing a few early songs for Niko and

being embarrassed that I was playing these dumb songs. We take it seriously, but we also, you know,

we're trying to have fun with it.

John Collins is our bass player, and that's a lot of the production. When we started, John said,

...